About Charles Harold Davis

Tonalist master Charles Davis had two distinct periods: the first in France, where he painted exquisite, sumptuous landscapes; and the second in Mystic, Connecticut, where he was drawn to expansive skies, which he painted with more broken and expressive facture. His early work had a simplicity and poise, revealing his predilection for capturing an otherworldly sense of light and air. His later American work displayed more inventive gestural handling, especially of cloud forms and steep hillsides and old pastures crisscrossed by stone walls, in which Davis’s flurried brushwork created an intense flickering of light and shadow. From 1910 on, Davis became famous for his expansive cloud paintings, depicting billowing cumulus formations and the infinite abstractions to be explored therein.